Supernatural: "Pac-Man Fever" Review

Charlie Signs Up For “How To Be A Hunter 101”.

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April 25, 2013

Note: Full spoilers for the episode follow.

In “Pac-Man Fever,” Felicia Day returned to Supernatural as Charlie Bradbury, the geeky-cool hacker friend of the Winchesters. It wasn’t that long since we last saw Charlie, it was only a handful of episodes ago that Sam and Dean joined her on a LARPing excursion. Since Charlie’s snarky banter with the boys is always welcome, I’m not complaining about seeing her again so soon; it’s nice to see the show building up some recurring characters outside of the heavy mythology episodes.

It was tough to see Sam in such rough shape at the beginning of the episode, suffering the effects of completing two of the trials, but let’s face it, the trials are supposed to be hard. Sam went to hell and came back; it’s only reasonable that there were some aftereffects from that. Sam’s insistence that he was still alright to hunt might have been more annoying if the early scenes between him and Dean hadn’t been so amusing. It was hard to say which was funnier, Dean’s initial reaction to Sam’s bed-head or his comment that he only needed five minutes and some clippers to fix things up. The tossed beer smashing on the floor was pretty great too.

After Charlie appeared with a case, the lightly comedic tone continued for the first portion of the episode. Dean’s decision that she needed a new wardrobe led to a montage I never thought I’d see on Supernatural as Charlie tried on different outfits and Dean reacted to them, all while Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine” played. Jensen Ackles can do hilarious facial reactions with the best of them. The scene got even better when Dean turned off the song, which had been playing on Charlie’s phone the whole time. Even the discovery of bodies with liquefied insides was played for laughs after a couple teenagers poked one and it exploded on them.

Things got more serious after they discovered that a Djinn was behind the deaths and she captured Charlie. Unlike Season 2’s “What Is and What Should Never Be”, the Djinn didn’t send Charlie to a fantasy world, but to a dangerous video game scenario where Charlie’s fear kept her in an endless loop. The episode had opened with a few minutes of the video game world, and while the rest of that sequence didn’t quite live up to how cool the first glimpse was, that wasn’t the point. It was fun to see Charlie in her Tomb Raider-esque getup and Dean dressed in a 1950’s Army uniform, but the focus was on Charlie accepting that her mother was gone and Dean helping her come to terms with that.

The mother-child theme was expanded further with the revelation that there were two Djinns at work, a mother and a son. It wasn’t too surprising when the coroner turned out to be one of the Djinn; she was impervious to Dean’s charm, so she was obviously evil. But I wasn’t expecting the second Djinn to be one of the teenagers from the crime scene. It helped explain why he wasn’t as traumatized as he should have been; I had written that off to him being in a video-game daze at the time. Fittingly, the mother was killed first, leaving the son to discover her body in the real world with Sam while at the same time Charlie was dealing with letting go of her mother in order to get out of the dream world she was trapped in with Dean.

There was a lot to like about this episode, although it was mostly filler in terms of the season-long storyline. I loved the vibe with Charlie and the Winchesters throughout the episode, especially with Dean as their bond was significantly deepened here. Their goodbye was very sweet, the “I love you”, “I know” being less of a winking reference to Han Solo and more of a genuine sentiment this time around, as opposed to how it was used in Charlie’s previous episode. Their relationship is very much like a brother and sister and it is nice to see something like that developing after the boys lost Bobby.

“Pac-Man Fever” was a regrouping of sorts for Sam and Dean. Sam admitted that he wasn’t at full hunting strength which Dean interrupted with a hug, and then declared that they needed to get back to work finding Kevin like Sam had said earlier. It was a great way to get us headed toward the end of the season. As Charlie said after reading the Carver Edlund books about Sam and Dean, when these two work together, they can accomplish a lot.

Diana Steenbergen is a writer at IGN TV. When she’s not watching TV, she’s – hahaha, just kidding. You can follow her at IGN at dsteenbergen.